May the victims rest in peace and may the perpetrators receive their just punishment in the world and the next.
What's sad and scary is that the current Ukrainian government hails Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and war criminals as heroes who were fighting for Ukrainian independence.
Apparently, this adopts the Nazi slogan of fighting against the Jewish-Bolshevik menace - including by torturing, raping and killing innocent Jewish and Polish women and children.
This is a moral dead end which will do nothing but lead to the moral decay of modern Ukrainian society and especially its youth.
Germany has learned the right lessons by acknowledging and condemning the genocide and war crimes that the Nazis committed during World War II against the Jews and other nations.
Unfortunately, modern anti-Russian Ukrainian Nationalists have not repented for the sins of their ancestors and believe that Nazi collaboration and related war crimes were justified by their fight against Stalin's Soviet Union.
FYI, comrade Joseph Stalin was not a Jew or a Russian - he was a Georgian Bolshevik who had graduated from a Jesuit seminary and, being an anti-Semite himself, successfully purged most Soviet Jewish communists (by imprisonment, exile and execution) until his reign ended in 1952.
As long as Ukrainian Nationalists and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera are touted as heroes and their direct participation in the Holocaust is denied, Ukraine will never become the modern European Democracy that its current political leadership claims to hold as its goal to win popular support.
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The Lviv pogroms
By Wikipedia
Selected Excerpts:
The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive massacres of Jews living in the city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists from 30 June to 2 July 1941, and from 25 to 29 July 1941, during the Wehrmacht's attack on Soviet-occupied eastern Poland in World War II.
The German historian Peter Longerich and the Holocaust Encyclopedia estimate that the first pogrom cost at least 4,000 lives.[1] It was followed by the additional 2,500 to 3,000 arrests and executions in subsequent Einsatzgruppe killings,[2] and culminated in the so-called "Petlura Days" massacre of more than 2,000 Jews, all killed in a one-month span.[1][3]
Prior to the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the ensuing Holocaust in Europe, the city of Lviv had the third-largest Jewish population in Poland during the interwar period, which swelled further to over 200,000 Jews as the refugees fled east from the Nazis.[4]
Prior to the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the ensuing Holocaust in Europe, the city of Lviv had the third-largest Jewish population in Poland during the interwar period, which swelled further to over 200,000 Jews as the refugees fled east from the Nazis.[4]
Holocaust scholar and survivor, Filip Friedman from Lviv, uncovered an official Report of the Reich Security Main Office which documented the massacre as follows: "During the first hours after the departure of the Bolsheviks [i.e. the Soviet Army], the Ukrainian population took praisworthy action against the Jews...
About 7,000 Jews were seized and shot by the [Ukrainian] police in retribution for inhuman acts of cruelty [at Brygidki and the other prisons]..." (dated 16 July 1941).[14]
About 7,000 Jews were seized and shot by the [Ukrainian] police in retribution for inhuman acts of cruelty [at Brygidki and the other prisons]..." (dated 16 July 1941).[14]
The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd
John-Paul Himka
Selected excerpts:
Lviv was a multinational city on the eve of World War II. In 1939 Poles formed a slight majority (157,490 of a total population of 312,231, i.e., just over 50 percent), followed by Jews (99,595 or 32 percent) and Ukrainians (49,747 or 16 percent).2 The national composition of the city changed radically during and as a result of the war: the Jews were murdered, the Poles deported, and numerous Russians immigrated.
Before war broke out, Lviv had been in Poland, but from September 1939 until the end of June 1941 it came under Soviet rule and was joined to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It changed hands again on 30 June 1941, when the Germans took the city.
Before war broke out, Lviv had been in Poland, but from September 1939 until the end of June 1941 it came under Soviet rule and was joined to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It changed hands again on 30 June 1941, when the Germans took the city.
Tuesday 1 July witnessed a full-blown pogrom. For this article I am using Raul Hilberg’s straightforward definition: “What are pogroms? They are short, violent outbursts by a community against its Jewish population.”10 On this day the violence took on a more ritualized form: Jews, men and women, were made to clean the streets;
Jewish women were singled out for humiliation; and Jews were made to perform various rituals that identified them with communism. The Lviv pogrom of 1941 drew precedents from an earlier pogrom in the city perpetrated in November 1918 by Polish soldiers and civilians; it also adopted tropes and rituals from anti-Jewish actions that occurred elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Just as in Lviv in 1918, in Vienna in March 1938, and in various localities in Poland in September 1939, in Lviv in 1941 Jews were forced to clean the streets. The point was to make Jews, who were prominent in the free professions and in business, engage in demeaning physical work. As a Jewish survivor remarked: “What a terribly debasing feeling it was when doctors and professors cleaned the streets with shovels in their hands [...].”11
According to a teenage girl, Germans and Ukrainians made a neighbour get her toothbrush to clean the street. They also made a Jewish man clean horse manure from the street by putting it in his hat.12 Judging by photographs, gentiles in Lviv found the Jewish cleaners amusing (see Figure 1). To some extent, the pogrom was a carnival.
One of the characteristic features of the pogrom was the maltreatment and humiliation of Jewish women. The scenes at Zamarstyniv street were photographed by a German camera crew;13 there is also a film of the abuse.14 There were some precedents for this in pogroms in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Women were forcibly undressed in Kraków in December 1939,15 and many members of OUN, and particularly those who were to form the backbone of the Bandera movement, were in Kraków at that time, waiting out the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine; there is no reason to suspect that they took part in these incidents, but they may well have witnessed them. In the Easter season pogrom in Warsaw in 1940 teenagers preyed on women, especially to rob them.16
A clearer precedent for what happened in Lviv in 1941 is what happened in Lviv in 1918; Joseph Tenenbaum, who was an eyewitness to the 1918 pogrom, wrote: “Women had to disrobe and stand naked to the delight of the crude mob.”17 In Lviv in 1941 women were shoved, kicked, beaten in the face and elsewhere with sticks and tools, pulled by the hair, and tossed from one pogromist to another.
Many of the women were stripped naked and exposed to the crowd. Some were chased through the street.18 Rose Moskowitz had a school friend who had become an active communist. A gang caught her, cut off her hair, and ran her down the street, naked, screaming. The girl went home and killed herself.19 A Polish rescuer saw “a boy like Hercules” beating a twelve-year old Jewish girl with a chain.20 Not surprisingly, rapes were also reported.
Pregnant women were hit or kicked in the stomach.22 The pogromists stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, lodged a baton in her vagina, and marched her past the post office to the prison action at Lontskoho.23 The women were robbed as well.24 Róża Wagner said she even saw prostitutes with their pimps requisitioning shoes and other items of apparel from the Jewish women.25 The victims were chosen at random, as long as they were Jewish.26
Why did OUN use its militia in Lviv to organize a pogrom and round up Jews for the Germans to kill? Partially, this flowed from the anti-Semitism of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and its leaders. Yet, anti-Semitism does not necessarily translate directly into such violence.
In fact, OUN seemed to perceive the Poles as much more important enemies than the Jews. In September 1939, when OUN acted openly and took advantage of the civil war conditions created by the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine, OUN units killed thousands of Poles. In summer 1941, as the Germans invaded, OUN militias and related organizations were involved in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews, but of relatively few Poles.128
When the OUN-led Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) definitively broke with the Germans in the late winter/early fall of 1943, it focused its attention on Poles, killing tens of thousands of them. In its official pronouncements, OUN always put Russians at the top of its enemy list.
Hence the focus on violence against Jews in the first days of the German occupation seems to be somewhat anomalous. The anomaly is most plausibly explained as an attempt by OUN to demonstrate to the Germans that it shared their anti-Jewish perspectives and that it was worthy to be entrusted with the formation of a Ukrainian state.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera provided the engine of the pogrom. It set up a short-lived government in Lviv on 30 June 1941 headed by a vehement anti-Semite. It simultaneously plastered the city with leaflets that encouraged ethnic cleansing. It also formed a militia that assumed a leadership role in the pogrom.
Militiamen went from apartment to apartment in Jewish neighbourhoods to arrest Jewish men and women for pogrom activities at two of the prisons; they arrested Jews on the street for a third prison that was more distant from where the Jewish population was concentrated. They conveyed the Jews to the prisons and were also present there at the maltreatment and execution of Jews.
The day after the pogrom they began to work directly for the Einsatzgruppen, again arresting Jews for execution by the Germans. OUN co-operated with the Germans in these anti-Jewish actions primarily because it hoped such collaboration would facilitate German recognition of its state. OUN’s anti-Semitism made assistance in anti-Jewish violence palatable, but it is unlikely that it was an independent factor in the decision to stage a pogrom.
As to the crowd, which is what made the pogrom a pogrom, its interest was in carnival. It relished role reversal, upturning the social hierarchy—Jewish professionals on their hands and knees cleaning streets. Those who were perceived as having been in charge during the Soviet occupation were now humiliated and forced to admit their guilt in ritualistic spectacles.
The stinking corpses of murdered political prisoners seemed to justify an apocalyptical revenge against the perceived perpetrators, namely the Jewish population. A particular conjuncture of high politics allowed the urban crowd to act out an uninhibited script of robbery, sexual assault, beating, and murder, demanding these actions and delighting in them.
Please read rest of the article at: https://www.academia.edu/1314919/The_Lviv_Pogrom_of_1941_The_Germans_Ukrainian_Nationalists_and_the_Carnival_Crowd
